Bobby and Syd Lea

Their Common Life

Bobby Lea is quiet. Syd Lea is exuberant. Bobby is an Olympic bike racer. Syd is a Special Olympics bike racer. One of these brothers just might need the other more than anyone ever imagined.

jack mccallum

THERE IS THE TENDENCY, when reflecting upon the Lea family, to deal in absolutes. You think what a shame it is that Syd is intellectually impaired. Then you see what he can do, how the family handles it. You see, for example, the clocks on the wall of Syd's bedroom, set to various international time zones, all of which he has visited. How many 26-year-olds of any intelligence level can tell you what time it is right now in Anchorage, Tehran, or Omsk, a city in southwestern Siberia where Syd went to train—alone—several years ago? You think about the miles traveled, the fascinating places seen, the friends gathered, the respect earned, and all those medals, ribbons, and inches of newspaper copy, and they are testaments to a life lived fully and well.

Just as it isn't all tragic, it isn't all wonderful, of course. Life has been, and will continue to be, messy and frustrating at times for the Leas, just as it is for all families. Sure, Dad is a psychologist who wrote his Harvard dissertation on "Acting-Up Disorders in Young Children," but that didn't give him a head start when Syd came home from the hospital. "What I know about intellectual disability," says Rob, "I know first-hand by living with it." It was trial-and-error for Tracy, too, even though she had experience working with troubled kids before Syd came along. When Bobby was a teenager they were arguing over one thing or another, and Tracy said to him: "Okay, Bobby, give me the manual. If there is one, I'll follow it. And if it's really a problem, take it up with your therapist later in life."

Syd has achieved much and gone far. But, still, he is mothered and fathered almost every day, and at this point in his life he'd be lost without it. He knows enough basic math to make conversions from two cups to six when he and Erin triple a Christmas-cookie recipe. He has the discipline to train his body for long bike races and enervating lactic-acid-producing rowing sprints. He has flown alone to more strange lands than many CEOs. Yet at other times, he treats hundred-dollar bills the same as ones, he tears through a supersized bag of chips in one sitting, and his mother worries every time he climbs into his VW Jetta. The point is, he traverses an unpredictable life course. And several months ago the parents decided to have what Tracy calls "The Conversation" with Bobby.

"You know, we won't always be here," they told their oldest, "and it's going to be up to you to take care of Syd." Tracy softened the blow a little by adding: "Bobby, you'll never have to mow the lawn, take out the trash, or shovel the snow."

Bobby was taken aback for a moment, but he wasn't all that surprised.

"They were re-doing their wills, and, though I hadn't thought about it much, part of me always assumed I'd take care of Syd," he says. "There was a time when we thought that if the planets aligned Syd might find the right girl and get married. But as he gets older it just doesn't seem to be in the cards. So...it's me."

So...it's Bobby, the young man who for so long has lived just outside the innermost circle of the cycling world, a shadow rider, a human being of so much potential who has not found his way to the top. It just might be that the explanation everyone is searching for lies in the fact that, however much he might have seemed born to be a bicycle racer, Bobby somehow comes into sharpest focus when aligned with his brother, a brother who is himself such a puzzle in many ways but so easy to grasp in others.